A Peshmerga security official said the remains of at least 11 Iraqi policemen killed by ISIS were found in a mass grave north of the country.
“A mass grave was discovered on Thursday in the Duraji area,” where there are many caves once used as hideouts by ISIS terrorist group, said Major General Muhammad Rustom, the commander of the Garmian (Qarba) axis.
Duraji is in Salaheddin province in an area disputed between the federal government and the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
“We think they had been prisoners of ISIS in 2018,” the official said, adding that both peshmerga and Iraqi federal police were taking part in the search, AFP reported.
“An engineering and medical team from the Iraqi Federal Police is on the scene,” he added.
He said the mass grave was discovered as a result of “intelligence information obtained from ISIS hideouts in the region where the extremists imprisoned members of the Iraqi forces they captured.”
ISIS seized swathes of Iraq in a lightning offensive in 2014, before being beaten back by a counter-insurgency campaign supported by a US-led military coalition.
Investigators have uncovered more than 200 mass graves containing thousands of bodies in areas of Iraq, according to a United Nations human rights report.
